Follows the legendary John Ford through a career that spanned more than five decades, drawing on dozens of personal interviews, material from Ford's estate, and film criticism.
During World War II, the British military dropped several dozen parachutists from Palestine, including three women, behind enemy lines in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. These young soldiers, most of whom had fled Europe only a few years earlier, faced a double challenge: their British mission was to find pilots who had jettisoned over enemy territory and assist them in returning to Allied-occupied lands; their Zionist mission was to contact Jewish communities, assist them in rebuilding the local Zionist movement, and, when necessary, help their members escape from the Nazis. Seven of the parachutists lost their lives in this effort. In Perfect Heroes, an expanded and updated English adaptation of her Hebrew book Giborim le-mofet, Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz recounts the history of these parachutists' wartime escapades and also analyzes the ways that various segments of Israeli society—military, political, legal, educational, youth, literary, and artistic—used the parachutists' story over the course of fifty years to build a nationalist narrative and to promote their own partisan and, at times, contradictory agendas. Baumel-Schwartz also offers broader comparative discussions of how individuals were commemorated as WWII heroes and heroines in many countries, in service of national mythologizing and collective memory.
The power of one is demonstrated in the lives of 18 leaders killed for their beliefs. This nonfiction book is about leaders who made a significant contribution to history and paid the ultimate price.
This Combo Collection (Set of 2 Books) includes All-time Bestseller Books. This anthology contains: The Life and Times of Major Dhyanchand The Life and Times of M.C. Mary Kom
A non-fiction exploring some of Northern Canada's greatest forgotten mysteries- the stories and legends surrounding the watershed of the South Nahanni River. . Deep in the heart of the Canadian North lies a mysterious valley shrouded in legend. Lured by tales of lost gold, prospectors who enter it tend to lose their heads or vanish without a trace. Some say that the valley is cursed- haunted by an evil spirit whose wailings echo in the canyons. Others claim that it is home to monsters- relics of its prehistoric past. What secrets could the valley be hiding? What mysteries lie buried beneath its misty shroud?
The Sword and the Shield is based on one of the most extraordinary intelligence coups of recent times: a secret archive of top-level KGB documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union which the FBI has described, after close examination, as the "most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source." Its presence in the West represents a catastrophic hemorrhage of the KGB's secrets and reveals for the first time the full extent of its worldwide network. Vasili Mitrokhin, a secret dissident who worked in the KGB archive, smuggled out copies of its most highly classified files every day for twelve years. In 1992, a U.S. ally succeeded in exfiltrating the KGB officer and his entire archive out of Moscow. The archive covers the entire period from the Bolshevik Revolution to the 1980s and includes revelations concerning almost every country in the world. But the KGB's main target, of course, was the United States. Though there is top-secret material on almost every country in the world, the United States is at the top of the list. As well as containing many fascinating revelations, this is a major contribution to the secret history of the twentieth century. Among the topics and revelations explored are: The KGB's covert operations in the United States and throughout the West, some of which remain dangerous today. KGB files on Oswald and the JFK assassination that Boris Yeltsin almost certainly has no intention of showing President Clinton. The KGB's attempts to discredit civil rights leader in the 1960s, including its infiltration of the inner circle of a key leader. The KGB's use of radio intercept posts in New York and Washington, D.C., in the 1970s to intercept high-level U.S. government communications. The KGB's attempts to steal technological secrets from major U.S. aerospace and technology corporations. KGB covert operations against former President Ronald Reagan, which began five years before he became president. KGB spies who successfully posed as U.S. citizens under a series of ingenious disguises, including several who attained access to the upper echelons of New York society.
This is the story of a pioneering folk hero. It is a colourful tale of adventure, discovery and survival in the remotest areas of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. William James O’Leary was a man of humble origins. His lifetime (1865-1947) spanned a period of New Zealand history when the country was searching for homegrown heroes in whose lives the young nation could discover clues to the question of its identity. The decades O’Leary spent in the unforgiving mountain country of North-West Otago and South Westland, prospecting for gold and other minerals and making new tracks in unexplored areas, was bound to be regarded with envy and admiration by townsfolk. The myth-making process was assisted when the nickname ‘Arawata Bill’ stuck, but it is the man’s astonishing feats of endurance, tenacity and charming eccentricity which capture the imagination. Add in the mystery of a lost ruby mine, a seaboot full of gold sovereigns and the aura of secrecy surrounding the quest for precious metal, and you have the stuff of which legends are made. Generations of New Zealand schoolchildren are familiar with Denis Glover’s poem Arawata Bill, yet the subject of that work was only loosely based on William O’Leary. The man himself, in his solitary and self-effacing way, was both smaller and greater than the legend. He emerged as one of those archetypal New Zealanders who helped to define a distinctive nationality. In this fully revised and updated biography, Ian Dougherty has separated the man from the myth, with a warmly human portrait of an ordinary man who lived an extraordinary life.
Every once in a while something happens in the world of sports that reminds us all why we care about such things. This book is the remarkable, untold story of the greatest team you've never heard of, the wrestling team of Cornell College, a private Methodist liberal arts college with only 415 male students, which won the NCAA wrestling championship in 1947, defeating all the major powers by a substantial margin. This tiny Iowa college thus became the first school outside of the state of Oklahoma ever to win the team championship since teams were officially recognized by the NCAA; no other private school before or since has done so. Not only that, but with the help of the town of Mount Vernon, and a fund-raising drive, the champions traveled to San Francisco and won the equally prestigious National AAU championship two weeks later, thus completing the grand slam of amateur wrestling. The Dream Team of 1947 is a classic David and Goliath story that transcends the sport.
Raoul Wallenberg, the courageous Swedish financier and trade executive turned diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in Hungary in 1944, was arrested in January 1945 by the Soviet military counterintelligence, incarcerated in the Lubianka prison in Moscow, and later executed for reasons that remain obscure to this day. Drawing on recently declassified Soviet encrypted cables and a wide array of Soviet, Swedish, and U.S. archival sources, Stalin’s Double-Edged Game: Soviet Bureaucracy and the Raoul Wallenberg Case, 1945–1952 offers the first comprehensive analysis of the inner workings and interdepartmental communication of the Soviet foreign and state security ministries in relation to Wallenberg’s case. The way these branches of the Soviet apparatus reacted to Swedish diplomatic approaches because of Wallenberg in the years 1945 through 1948 indicate that Stalin never had any plan for Wallenberg other than to have him murdered and to make the Swedes believe that he died in Hungary shortly after the fall of Budapest. This book thereby challenges prevailing hypotheses about the Soviet leader’s motives in regard to Wallenberg.